Venice Film Festival 2024: The Biennale College | Festivals & Awards
It was in 2015 that I received my first invitation to the Venice Film Festival from Peter Cowie, the venerable scholar and critic. His new book, God and the Devil: The Life And Work of Ingmar Bergman, is a crowning achievement in Bergman studies, a career highlight from a master who hasn’t lost a step over a career that spans over half a century. It felt like a fortuitous invitation; my mother, who had always wished for me a trip to Italy, died earlier in the year. The 2015 Biennale was my first time out, and I felt her presence over my shoulder as I took in the wonders of Venice.
And I’ve been coming back ever since, not counting of course the Covid Break Year of 2020. My mission, along with a stellar cast of fellow critics — the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Philips, Time Magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek, protean arts maven Chris Vognar, whose work appears in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and a lot of papers in his native Texas, Finnish critic Sara Ehnholm Hielm, as well as the overseer of the program, Savina Neirotti — is to assess the films sponsored by the Biennale College and if possible counsel its filmmakers. This year there were four pictures financed by the festival, to the tune of 200,000 Euros a pop (in the beginning it was 150,000; the times do change).
The selection committee goes through well over one thousand proposals, picks three, or four, of the ones it considers most worthy; the director and producer then come out here to workshop, and ten months after that, they deliver finished features using Biennale funds only. Over the years there’s been solid work and there’s also been stunning work — see Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s “This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection,” which roiled the art film world to the extent it was eventually given a Criterion Collection home video release. Another College film that made a big impression on me was Ricky D’Angelo’s “The Cathedral;” the filmmaker is here this year, on a jury, and over coffee earlier today he told me a bit about his next project, which sounds exciting indeed. Today also saw the panel, and now I can tell you about what I saw.
Watching the movies sponsored by the Biennale College this year for the Venice Film Festival, I had a rather disquieting initial thought: Has the College developed a “house style?” With one exception, these were somber, realistic linear dramas. (Among other things, both Mosese’s film and D’Ambrose’s film — not to mention Anna Rose Holmer’s exemplary 2015 entry “The Fits” — are works of considerable formal daring.) But this was based on a superficial reading, I’m afraid. What three of the four films do with varying degree of urgency is address human, social and political trauma in specific places, and in a specific time, that being NOW.
